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Steve Curran is the founder and creative director of Pod Design, and has been delivering award-winning marketing since 1988. Pod's successful viral marketing efforts have been featured in stories run by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, AdWeek, CNN Money and NBC News. Before founding Pod, Steve was VP & Creative Director of Gametek and Co-founder of online promotions firm e-tractions.

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Marketing Media-Less Campaigns: How Creating Viral is Like Walking a Tightrope without a Net

Written on
Oct 23, 2006 
Author
Steve Curran  |
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Marketing Media-Less Campaigns: How Creating Viral is Like Walking a Tightrope without a Net

Viral marketing, with no media campaign to support it, is like walking a tightrope without a net. The campaign lives or dies by whether or not the audience responds and embraces the campaign, evangelizing it peer-to-peer.

While it’s true that no great media placement can make a print or online campaign a success, it is an equal contributor to the value of a campaign in that it provides at least the measurement of quantifiable exposure.

Viral marketing, on the other hand, is not measured by mere exposure, but by how far you have gone to create a phenomenon of unpaid response in the form of pass-along or click-through.

So while there is no sure-fire formula for mass popularity, there are a number of things to keep in mind in the creative process to keep a long leash from becoming a short noose:

• Research where the audience lives, chats, interacts and socializes online. Is there a hot button inside that community that can be built into a campaign that will bring the client/brand in to the conversation as an insider?

• Don’t overstep the boundaries of taste that you observe existing inside of a community. Okay, maybe overstep it just a little. But what’s shocking to one audience is tame to another. Find where that line is, and dance around it.

• The bigger the idea, the smaller the explanation. If it takes too long to communicate the idea when you describe it, it’s not going to get any easier in a subject line, blog headline, or a bulletin board posting. In any context, you have only a few seconds to capture attention.

• It’s got to be fun to work on. A pretty good sign that you are headed down the right path on a concept is when your creatives are chomping at the bit to work on a proposed idea. If there is lack of enthusiasm about fleshing out the details and people are not eager to get started, chances are you are headed for trouble. If your creative team can’t generate the enthusiasm to have fun, it’s going to show in the execution, and the audience won’t bite.

• Listen to the client. Sacrilege! As unpopular as that notion might be to some creatives, the client knows the audience much better than you do. Listening to their feedback about how they believe their audience will react is invaluable. That doesn’t mean let them direct the creative, but learning how extract value from the clients knowledge vs what might water-down or ruin the creative is another black-art skill of the profession.

From a business perspective, the difficulty with the business model of creating viral marketing online is that there is not a significant amount of re-use of digital assets project-to-project, client-to-client. The most significant asset you own is the instinct and intuition that comes from experience, trial and error, failure and success. But in a media environment of rapidly escalating clutter, combined with increasing opportunities for audiences to fast-forward, skip, or ignore, it could be the most tangible and valuable asset of all.

It’s risky working without a net, but it’s the kind of high-wire act most creatives are willing to live with (and sometimes thrive on) in return for hearing those magic words from a client, “we want to take a risk…”





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